There are subjectives, and then there are these. While you may believe a work fits here, and you might be right, people tend to have rather vocal, differing opinions about this subject. Please keep these off of the work's page.

Meji: …so… um… you're Jon's long lost, estranged sister, who's been turned into an emotionless magic Ninja assassin by some secret order of monks hidden in the mountains? That's like, really, kinda freaking stupid if you don't mind me saying. And I thought your brother's whole "hitman with a troubled past and a heart of gold" bit was bad. Ellis: Yeah, and this is coming from a magic-using, half elven heiress with unusual hair and eye colors, and talking animal companion. So that's really saying something there.

And then there are authors who don't want anyone stealing the limelight from the surrogate, so they pile every single Sue trait onto one character, creating a sort of… Hive Sue. On the other hand, authors that are slightly more fandom-savvy may forgo making original Sues and turn all their favorite canon characters into Possession Sues instead in order to fall under the Mary-Sue Hunter radar.

And the above example raises a kind of interesting question: When everyone is a Mary Sue, would they cancel each other out? Or would the universe implode? The idea that they cancel each other out and keep the setting in conflict is one of the major rationales behind this trope. After all, fantasy settings, polytheistic settings involving any Gods, and Comic Books can get away with nigh-omnipotent characters fighting each other and creating conflict without the readers calling out the characters as Canon Sues.

Community

Tropes HQ

TVTropes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available from thestaff@tvtropes.org. Privacy Policy